Judgment – (Blog)

Tags

Alcohol, Blogs, Bob Dylan, Dead Man Walking, God, Happiness, Help, Joy, Judgment, Leaving Las Vegas, Peace, Pink Floyd, Slaughterhouse Five

 

Quite a few years ago, back in 1995 at a time that has almost become a time two decades past, I was a newborn college student.

Heady times. I remember, that fall, two very good and hard-to-watch movies came out.

One was “Leaving Las Vegas,” in which Nicholas Cage played an alcoholic who, fed up with life, decides to go to Las Vegas and drink himself to death. And even Elizabeth Shue, as a prostitute who in another film would have “saved and redeemed him,” in then end cannot help. Somehow, she didn’t judge him in the end, for quitting on her, and on life.

The other film was “Dead Man Walking,” a film based on a non-fiction book by Sister Helen Prejean, and telling the story of a nun who tries to help a man sentenced to die on death row. He was accused of partaking in the grisly murder of a young girl, with a friend, and while he protests his innocence of being anything more than an unwilling accomplice, the evidence doesn’t back him up. Much like Elizabeth Shue in “Leaving Las Vegas,” she attempts to redeem him, but in the end cannot. It turns out he was the primary murderer, and one of the harder sequences I’ve ever had to watch in a film was the beginning of his walk to the moment of his death.

I’m here mostly to talk about the latter film. To me, it’s notable for two reasons that wouldn’t matter to most people.

The first, and much smaller reason, is that it contains maybe the first notable role for Jack Black, who played Sean Penn’s unfunny younger brother before later becoming a great and famous comedian.

The second, and much larger reason, is that the film started a major transformation inside my sprit, a transformation revolving around the word “judgment.” I still remember, that freshman year in college, getting caught up in the “perspective” the film offered. All films give you just perspective. They lead you by the nose to care about certain other real people, while preventing you from caring about other equally real people. And in so doing, it creates drama, focus, and more.

Of course it’s baloney. Another film could lead you by the nose to empathize with other characters, and everything would be different. And we would not mind. In that other film we would be content to see Sean Penn’s character as a monster. And we would likely not imagine our perspective being “partial” either. It would feel like… “the” perspective.

It reminds me of “Slaughterhouse Five.” In it, aliens not constrained by Time, the Tralfamadorians, try to teach Billy Pilgrim about the terrible limitations of Human perspective.

The quote from the book that I always think back on goes as follows:

–

The guide invited a crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.

This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The flat end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.

The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped–went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “that’s life.”

–

So.

I watched “Dead Man Walking,” in college in 1995, and there was a scene in it when Sister Helen Prejean is visiting the family of the murdered girl. At this point, the audience has been led by the nose to sympathize with her and the murderer. We expect them to see that, but what they expect is that she is at their home to help them, the victims.

She tells them she is helping the murderer, in prison. And they turn on her. They tell her to leave.

I still remember the shock I felt. It was the feeling of being terribly tricked. And I noticed. And what’s more, I didn’t merely say “oops” and then, to protect my ego, go on again as if I would just naturally get it right next time.

I changed. I started to notice the limitations of perspective. I, perhaps, took those first steps to leave the “know it all” region of teenaged youth and the “much to learn” realm of adulthood. I remember, as I’ve done few times in my life, walking around in a daze, feeling my insides… transmogrify (to borrow a word from “Calvin and Hobbes”).

Except it wasn’t an easy zap.

It did start me down the road of someone who, perhaps to his detriment in other ways, was always most interested in a deeper understanding and not merely “going with the flow.” It affected many things. Religion, of course, though “blind faith” already did not sit well with me. Classes too, and the way they were taught by teachers. But it also affected my view of people.

You could say it led me toward that Bob Dylan quote I keep using.

Hurt. Pain. Holiness. Love.

I’m summarizing.

That’s right, Bob. You ponder these issues too. I could use your help. They’re big issues. And I don’t have enough perspective to manage them all by myself.

So.

Why am I talking about judgment? Various reasons.

One side reason is that I had a dream some months ago. In it, I dreamt I was playing basketball on the old, stone gymnasium floor of the Danville School that ceased existing when the addition was put on in the early 90s. I still remember a kid in my class, a vile kid who seemed destined for evil, falling once and breaking a tooth on the stone as if Fate were warming him up for a waiting curb stomp.

So. I played basketball. And for some reason, I was judging and criticizing all the other kids on my team. I needed them to play better. They weren’t doing it right. I had to fix things.

And then, in the dream, a high school friend of mine called me out for it. He was the same friend who once called me out for a very out-of-character attempt to cheat at poker during a friendly Friday night game. For some reason I felt it would be a good idea. Interesting. And then, as has become so common in my life, I hurt someone I care about or respect, or make them angry, and a nuclear bomb of guilt goes off inside me and it’s days before my body is suitable for life again.

But the dream.

In the dream, when my friend called me out, with anger, in an instant I fell into “fuck it all” depression. And I… had to get away. I left him, the game, the gymnasium and the school. Some people tried to follow me, like my high school basketball coach and my high school soccer coach, tried to find out what was wrong, and to help.

But I had to get away. Being around them, being a part of any system, disgusted me. And, in the dream, though dreams are almost invariably a respite from depression, depression fell out of the sky and only my soul like God’s own dead body.

And then I woke up. I felt better. And the memory confused me.

The other reason I’m talking about judgment? It relates to the blog entry I put up a while back, which I trashed when I realized not only that the musings should’ve been a journal entry, but that the musings were incomplete, judgmental, and even dangerous. It had to do with work, entitlement, a desire for society to make it easier for people to be of value….

Artists feel that. They get into their work, with all their heart, and then the “money” that makes up the bones of Life leaves that artistic ego feeling like nothing more than a jellyfish stranded on a hot, equatorial beach.

And what was more? It came at the expense of someone who tried to help me, a person who I was, during that depressed post, seeing only through that limiting pipe. Maybe the train’s motion lulled me to sleep. Maybe it was just an attempt to turn the anger away from myself and onto not just a person but on a system in general. Ours. I don’t want it to be so hard to be of value.

But then, when my blindness and judgment got pointed out, I felt the readiness of that nuclear bomb to explode inside me. Thankfully I was on the phone with a good friend when I was alerted to how I’d fallen into one of those ridiculous disconnects that human beings fall into all the time. Sometimes it’s as if I know that blogs are for reading by others, and that people read mine, but that, somehow, I just don’t fully believe it. Sometimes it’s as if I’m still just doing what I did for a decade, which is write in my journal while no one at all listens.

But you are listening, aren’t you. You are. Somewhere.

I kept the bomb from going off, just barely. And I made amends, quite thankfully. But it disturbed me nonetheless. What other kinds of blindnesses am I setting myself up for, in “doing what it takes” to succeed at writing rather than “being a good person”? A man can only focus on so many things at one time.

In both “Leaving Las Vegas” and “Dead Man Walking,” it was women who, on some level, failed to save men. But on another level they did save those men. Nicholas Cage knew he was loved, and Sean Penn accepted his truth.

There’s so much to learn. And there’s so much to be happy about. And there are so many people out there worth knowing.

And the bones of Life aren’t all of life. It’s a gamble to stay in Las Vegas where Reality has become nothing but the skeleton of something larger. The sure bet, as I judge things, is with the people who care about you.

Yes you’ll fuck up. But people know almost nothing, and they make mistakes. You know this at least. Forgive yourself.

We’re all dead men and women walking. The only question is whether we march toward our death with the truth in our hearts. Well, maybe it’s not the only question, but it’s a good question. And, not being a teenager anymore, I can say that I am a big fan of good questions. Leave the judgment to the higher powers.

Make peace.